1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique regarding an instruction to process a document saved on a network provided by a cloud service. More particularly, the present invention relates to a printing system which prints a document on the network, a control method thereof, and a computer-readable medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a cloud computing system (to be referred to as a cloud service) is becoming popular as a form in which management of work data and various processes are performed on the server computer side. A user can print, via a print service, a document (document data) saved on a network provided by the cloud service. A user accesses a Web page provided by the cloud service from the Web browser of a client terminal via the Internet or the like and displays, on the Web page, a work window containing details of the document he wants to print. When the user issues a job save instruction via the window, the cloud service transmits a print job to the print service to save the job or perform print processing. When the document is saved in the print service, the user further accesses the Web page of the print service from the Web browser of the client terminal, the control panel of a printing apparatus, or the like. The user needs to select, on the Web page, a document he wants to print, and input a print instruction.
Some platforms regarding the cloud service include a microblogging function. The microblogging function is one communication service. A user having an account for this service can post a short message called “tweet”, and a unique identifier is assigned to every posting. A user here includes objects, applications, and the like on the cloud service such as the above-mentioned work window, a printer, and a cooperative service, and is not limited to a real user (human). A user-specific Web page called a “timeline” displays a posting by himself and a posting by a “following” user, enabling communication via following. “Following” means a user registers another user so that a message posted by the registered user can be displayed on the Web page of the user. The cloud service is, for example, Salesforce.com®, and its microblogging function is Salesforce Chatter®.
A technique of executing processing by a server based on an instruction from a client is as follows. The client terminal transmits a file describing an execution command to an FTP folder. Upon detecting that the client terminal has transmitted the file, the server executes an instruction described in the file, and can execute a job (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-10922).
A user who has logged in to a platform providing the cloud service needs to save a job in the print service via a work window and then transmit, to the print service, a file describing an execution command which designates a job and user name. Thus, the platform providing the cloud service requires a function of managing, by itself, information of a job saved in the print service. When the user logs in to the print service and selects a job from a list of saved jobs, he needs to log in to respective services till the completion of printing, and work for a series of processes is cumbersome.